Draft template for proposals

This is a rough draft of a standard template for proposals to make it easy to find important elements that are common to most proposals.


Project Title

Proposal Type: Hive service | Opensource | Closedsource | Marketing | Advertising | Hive advocacy
Principals:

Costs

  • Labor:
  • Equipment:
  • 3rd party payments:
  • Recurring costs:

Cost and expected completion date by milestone (below is just an example)

  • Phase 1: Design ($3K) 2 weeks
  • Phase 2: Prototype ($10K) 1 month
  • Phase 3: Production ($30K) 2 month

Progress reporting: By milestone | Daily | Weekly | Monthly

Project Summary

Project description

Benefits

What happens if the proposal becomes unfunded?


What are the proposal types?

  • Hive service = the principals are setting up some kind of service that benefits members of the Hive community
  • Opensource = the software being developed can be modified by anyone
  • Closedsource = the software's source code is not being shared (generally this really means a Hive service is being offered, but that it needs to be developed first)
  • Marketing = the proposal will develop marketing material for Hive (pitch decks, whitepapers, etc)
  • Advertising = the proposal will pay for some form of advertising (e.g google ads, etc)
  • Hive advocacy = the proposal will pay for people to promote Hive (e.g. at conferences)

Note the above is not an exclusive set of all types of proposals, it's just a list of some common types. And also note that a proposal may be listed as several types (for example a software proposal to develop software for providing a Hive service).

What should be listed for principals?

Principals are the people who will be managing the proposal's funds (and likely doing the work too, in many cases). In the case where the work is being done by someone else, this should generally be mentioned in the Project description section. Hive acount names should be a minimum, but if they aren't well known, real names would also be nice to know (there should be some reputational consequences for failing to deliver and keeping funds).

Explanation of proposal costs

Labor will generally be the largest costs for most project.

Equipment is any long term equipment purchased either for development or for production deployment.

3rd party payments are one time payments for things other than labor or equipment (e.g. purchasing a license to operate).

Recurring costs are any regularly repeating costs that would likely need to be paid after the proposal is completed. Recurring costs might not be included in the cost of the proposal, but possibly will be funded by a recurring proposal after initial development is done. For example, if the proposal is to develop software that will provide a service to Hive, there may be recurring costs associated with maintaining a server that provides the service.

Cost by milestone

In this section, the proposers can break down their planned work into phases/milestones, including expected cost to reach each milestone and estimated time to reach each milestone.

Progress reporting

The idea of this field is to set expectations about how often the principals plan to update the community on their progress.

Project Summary

One or at most two paragraphs that quickly summarize the project. The project summary could be omitted if the Project description itself is very brief.

Project description

This is the section where the proposers can describe the details of their proposal.

Benefits

This section should just indicate any reasons why voters might want to approve the proposal.

What happens if the proposal becomes unfunded?

Due to the nature of the DHF, a proposal can be unfunded prior to completion. In this section, the proposal can indicate how the principals plan to react in that case. For example: Will they keep working on the project at a reduced rate? Will they make available any work product they have created up till that point?

Feedback wanted

Please note this is really just a "rough draft", mostly to start the conversation on what such a template might look like. Also, I don't think we should ask that the use of any particular template be "mandatory". But I do think many proposals will find it easier to get funded if they make it easier to answer the questions that will commonly be asked by voters, and a standard template could be one good way to do that.

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Really good template. Have been thinking, that for people with no access to computer or programming skills, there would be a call for action-option, where everyone can recommend improvements, graphically talented could make promotion material etc.

Some kind of resource database would make things way easier. Planner meets the doer, would be good to consider projects, which does not need funding, just for the fun of it. So many ideas, hard to figure out where to use them.

A resource database is an excellent idea! I actually started a very primitive form of this a while back in the Hive gitlab wiki, but it's mostly limited to programmer skills, and I didn't advertise it that well either. In hindsight, this would be handled much better by a Hive community, so I've created one called Hive Skills: https://hive.blog/trending/hive-179690

Hive skills is a great idea. I've always thought we needed a talent/skills capturing area and let people know they can earn for their talents.

Another potential use of this is proposers could link to the Hive Skills posts of the principals and other Hivers who would likely be working on the proposal.

I suggest @peakd makes this a default template available for all users. Maybe use a repo so pull requests can be made to make adjustments in the future.

Via git is good as this will allow other front-ends to use it as well. But I would personally also allow users to write them as they want too. I don't like the "mandatory template" option.

Very good idea!

I like the idea of making it available, although not mandatory!

I suggest all existing proposals to update their posts if they can to incorporate this, so it is easy for voters to follow template. Once we have some standard I believe voting and understanding proposals/goals will be much easier.

I was about to suggest it! :)

I appreciate the business-focused approach this brings to proposals. It seems complete as a rough outline. I agree that it should only be mandatory from the perspective of people choosing to not vote proposals without them. If we can agree on a standard, I would certainly save my vote in the majority of cases for people who decide to conform to it. It would be really helpful to have an example proposal that was fully vetted, because people without any business background may run into some difficulty. It should be more of an enabler for people with a comprehensive plan than a barrier to them.

Looks like mine. Excellent, I don't have to edit all that much.

I understand this would be a basis for anyone trying to make these kinds of proposals. I just have to announce who wants to venture into making a proposal that in the first few months you have to maintain consistency and faith in the project, although always having an open mind to make the necessary changes to adjust the methods and tools.

Thank you for this information!

I will save it in my favorites so as not to lose sight of it.

The proposal improvement is highly necessary to be and also for all the voters need more clarification on how the proposal will be funded gradually or some strategies needed to be considered

This a fantastic starting point for those that may be new to proposals. kudo's!

This sounds quite reasonable to me and I do not see what to add. Now, allowing one to reduce a proposal duration or funding request would be great.

It sounds like a plan where everyone can see a well defined template to choose if that project should be funded or not.

Looks good to me, and it can always be updated if need be.

I like it. This is already an 80% solution if not higher.

I particularly like the cost summary and phases of work part.

Can we add a “back payment” segment? Meaning only a very limited part of the proposal can be funded paying for previous work. Say no more than 10%. This will discourage a lot of back payment and a clear path of point forward auditing.

This is a very standard practice in the real world.

Thank you for putting it together.

Taking a page from Simon Senik, I think it would be beneficial to start with Why. So Benefits should be first IMO.

I considered that idea when writing the draft, but I don't think it's the best way to go in practice. It's much easier to explain benefits of something after you've explained what it is, IMO.

It's much easier to explain benefits of something after you've explained what it is, IMO.

Perhaps, and I see no reason why you couldn't do both, but if you don't explain the "Why" before you explain the "How", you leave the audience to guess that on their own or even worse, to not know.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that they should define the problem first. That way you can more readily understand the reasons certain things are needed.

For example, I happen to know why you made this post because I witnessed the conversation you had on your other thread. You stated that sometimes the proposals are hard to understand. So to you and me, this proposal makes sense because we know what problem it fixes...we know "why" it is being suggested.

Others may simply view it as more bureaucracy being introduced into the process with no benefit and write it off on a glance without reading all the way to the end.

I don't think we're really far apart on this, as I kind of assumed that the root "why" should be addressed in the project summary, before the detailed description.

My intent with the benefits section was that someone could go into details about why their particular solution meets the more general need, which could only be explained easily after explaining the details of their solution.

Oh, this is a terrific template, and not so rough. I think it would be better if there’s a mandatory template that is set by the community. The template could be on GitHub, so that it could be updates from time to time.

No other changes matter until we can vote against a proposal. Until everyone, for or against, has a voice I won't be voting for any changes...

Hey man i read this and remembered your account system development in the past and think this is a great bussiness oportunity to you.
here the news in cointelegraph, good luck.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/irs-seeks-third-party-contractors-to-help-with-taxpayers-crypto-calculations

@blocktrades this is a good development. It's good it's going to be made available.
Regards

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Yep! A very good one here, although all of ours are kicked off with an executive summary first that details the reasons for an application, such as "The Problem" and the "Solution".

But I see that you have sections in that will reveal this.

Would be great if everyone could adopt this template!

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I will need to keep coming back to this as I write.

This will help me a lot as I continue to write and re write this proposal I have been working on. The formatting of the proposal has proven to be the hardest part and leads to excessive text on my part.

Thanks.

I am really interested in learning more about proposals any communities out there that would be able to help out ?